Visa Europe Prepares for V.me Digital Wallet Launch in Autumn

Visa Europe says it will launch its V.me digital wallet to an initial group of users in the UK, Spain and France this autumn.

Digital Wallet

Visa has announced its plans to release a wallet that stores visa and non-visa accounts, enabling users to pay for transaction online and in person through their computers and mobiles. The company is already working with several financial institutions and merchants in the US and Canada and is now ready to move into the European market, offering the service through its member banks. Specifically the service will launch in the United Kingdom, France, and Spain.

“V.me sits at the heart of Visa’s future of payments,” said Mariano Dima, executive vice president of product and marketing solutions at Visa Europe “For the first time, consumers and retailers will have a streamlined online checkout experience through an acceptance mark that offers industry-leading security, and when a Visa card is used in a V.me wallet, the same protection and rights that come with any Visa card transaction.”

Click To Buy Technology

In the UK, payments processor WorldPay has been signed up as a development partner with further collaborators in each market, including banks and retailers, to be announced “soon”.Visa has said that that its mobile wallet will be facilitated through its partner banks and that it would announce those banks later.

Visa refers to its V.me program as a digital wallet, not a mobile digital wallet – a key distinction. Visa claims that V.me will enable click-to-buy on a computer, touch-to-buy for a mobile browser, and wave-to-buy for physical point-of-sale NFC transactions. Rivals, such as Google Wallet, have been primarily oriented around mobile transactions.

E-commerce already represents 22% of Visa Europe’s transactions and grew 44% between 2009 and 2011. The V.me wallet is the firm’s central tool in its battle for dominance in the online and mobile commerce markets, where it faces competition from a slew of rivals from the tech and telco worlds.